Council's Peritus: "Vatican II Liturgical Reform Was Stillborn"
Archimandrite Boniface Luykx (1915–2004) was a Belgian Premonstratensian canon regular, professor, and liturgical scholar. In the 1940s and 1950s he was among the leading figures of the Catholic liturgical movement and taught for many years at the University of Notre Dame’s Summer School of Liturgy. From 1960 to 1971 he served as a missionary in Africa, where he founded the Monastère de l’Assomption and taught at Lovanium University in Kinshasa, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). Beginning in 1959, he was a member of the Preparatory Commission for the Liturgy and later served as a liturgical consultant and expert (peritus) at the Second Vatican Council, as well as one of the authors of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy (Sacrosanctum Concilium).
After the Council, he became a member of the Consilium ad exsequendam Constitutionem de sacra Liturgia (Council for the Implementation of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy). As a parallel institution to the Sacred Congregation of Rites, the Consilium exercised its mandate autonomously until 1969. It reported directly to Pope Paul VI and, under the leadership of Father Annibale Bugnini, was responsible for drafting new liturgical texts.
After the Council, Archimandrite Boniface Luykx spent many years fighting against distortions and misinterpretations of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy. From 1972 to 2000, he served as founding abbot of Holy Transfiguration (Mt. Tabor) Monastery in Northern California, which belongs to the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. In 1988 he was granted the honorary title of Archimandrite, which in the Eastern Churches denotes the spiritual father of one or more monasteries.
He wrote these memoirs and analytical essays between 1995 and 1997. On April 11, 2004, Easter Sunday, he died at Postel Abbey, the Belgian Premonstratensian monastery in Belgium.
Key Quotes
- The whole thrust of our post-Christian crisis, then, is the destruction of the liturgical undergirding of human life. Here is the key point: as liturgy is the first 'victim of the crisis' working to restore true worship must be one of the first tasks in any effort to over come the crisis and restore true culture—and such Work will produce the first benefits. If one understands this fact, he will understand the importance of my in-depth coverage of the postconciliar liturgical crisis in this book. (page 144)
- The grave error of our day is an overemphasis on exterior participation to the exclusion of the interior. This misunderstanding of the true nature of “active participation” has resulted in the virtual elimination of an attitude of prayer and reverence within Catholic worship, to the great detriment of the faithful. (35)
- There was perfect continuity between the preconciliar period and the Council itself, but after the Council this crucial continuity was broken by the postconciliar commissions. (80)
- “We here work from the assumption that the modern Western man is the model of all true humanity, for all countries and cultures, and for all ages to come”. These are the shocking words of Father Annibale Bugnini, secretary of the papal Consilium charged with implementing the liturgical reform of the Second Vatican Council, spoken during a meeting of the Consilium. One might ask the obvious and serious question: From whence does one man [Father Bugnini], or group, get the right to impose his way of praying or celebrating upon the whole Western Church? (87)
- The Novus Ordo is not faithful to the Constitution on Sacred Liturgy (CSL), but goes substantially beyond the parameters which CSL set for the reform of the Mass rite. (98)
- The Novus Ordo was indeed favorable toward ecumenical efforts with Protestants — but it gravely hurt those efforts with the Eastern Churches, contrary to the Council’s intent. (99)
- The steamroller of man-centered horizontalism (as opposed to God-centered verticalism) has flattened all liturgical forms after Vatican II, but its main victim is the Novus Ordo. … The main loser in this process is the mystery, which should be, on the contrary, the main object and content of the celebration. (104)
- The altar facing the people, however, is perhaps the most serious flaw and expression of the incorrect approach to true worship so common in the changes after the Council. … This weakening or even destruction of the vertical dimension has become perhaps the basic counterfeit of the new liturgy as well as the undoing of the true Church. One might say that therein lies the original sin of the new liturgy and the corruption of what the Council had intended. The great German liturgist, Monsignor Klaus Gamber, has clearly shown what I have experienced and written here: the Novus Ordo is manifestly contrary to the intent of CSL and would not have been approved by the Council Fathers. Rather, it was forced upon the Western Church by the order of Pope Paul VI, to assure the goodwill of our Protestant brethren. (111)
- What is the solution to this massive problem? I submit that pluriformity—that is, the coexistence of different forms of liturgical celebration while maintaining the essential core — could be a great aid to the Western Church. … Pope John Paul II in fact adopted the principle of pluriformity when he restored the Tridentine Mass in 1988. (113)
- Cardinal Ratzinger has also given his support, declaring that the old Mass is a living and, indeed, “integral” part of Catholic worship and tradition, and predicting that it will make “its own characteristic contribution to the liturgical renewal called for by the Second Vatican Council.” (115)
- The destruction of the Sacred is the deepest assault on man’s dignity in his thinking and living… The consequences of this assault are enormous and all-pervading. For instance, it imposes upon man, who is made for the Beyond, the naturalization of the supernatural and the supernaturalization of the natural, by making the this-world-man the norm of all values. With this comes the total relativism of these values, which is at the basis of our inextricable modern crisis. (119)
- When reverence is gone, all worship becomes only horizontal entertainment, a social party. Here again the poor, the little ones, are the victims, since the obvious reality of life as flowing out of God in worship is taken away from them by “experts” and dissenters. (120)
- Erroneous theological foundations of the new liturgy. … Behind these revolutionary exaggerations were hidden three typically Western but false principles: (1) the concept (a la Bugnini) of the superiority and normative value of modern Western man and his culture for all other cultures; (2) the inevitable and tyrannical law of constant change that some theologians applied to the liturgy, Church teaching, exegesis, and theology; and (3) the primacy of the horizontal. (131)
- By giving the divine dimension to the profane, worship is per se the creator of beauty. This explains why the inner tendency of the new liturgy—despite its claiming the opposite — is actually the destruction of the divine beauty which Holy Tradition had accumulated in the Church’s worship, and why cosmetic corrections cannot solve the new liturgy’s problem. (135)
- The result of horizontalizing worship is the almost totally socialized and man-centered dimension of the liturgy now found in most parishes. But this destroys the most basic meaning of all worship. It is a tragic desacralization of Christian worship, where man, not God, is central, and the liturgy becomes a fireside affair, a civil performance intended to make everyone feel happy, as in some Protestant groups. (135)
- Why is the Christian reaction- especially that of the bishops - so weak and cowardly in the face of this wholesale sellout of Christian culture? It is because we are witnessing, above all, a crisis of grace. … Sacrifice and prayer - especially contemplation and mysticism - are forgotten items in the postconciliar “new church” and new world. (144)
- Egocentric horizontalism has been perhaps the seminal principle of the postconciliar crisis. … Into this vacuum moved the egalitarian relativism of strident feminism; then came pagan inculturation that adapted everything to the measure of man, not God. (148)
- The great message of our time is that Christ is the only solution, and hence Christianity is the only valuable counter-culture. Worship is the counter-culture’s most active element, as the main carrier, expression, and guarantee of the gospel and Holy Tradition. Consequently, the Church’s worship cannot be the experimental garden of theologians, liturgists, and misguided clergy. This is, of course, precisely the message of this 'whole book and, I dare claim, the very teaching of the Church and Holy Tradition. (168)
- The liturgical renewal after Vatican II has become like a miscarriage or stillborn baby, because of the man-centered impatience of those appointed to bring it to its rightful maturity. … The only creativity of this rebellion consists in pulling down the Sacred (and with it, true culture) to the street level. (169)
- Thus to force upon our poor ones a totally horizontal liturgy—in an unholy space, with tasteless music and untheological language — is to force them to live in a sterile world of lies where Holy Tradition and the Spirit of God are choked and true spiritual life cannot bloom. I am not saying that the aborted liturgical reform is part of this world of lies; it is rather its victim. (173)
- No hierarch, from a simple bishop to the pope, may invent anything. Every hierarch is a successor of the apostles, which means that he is first of all a keeper and servant of Holy Tradition—a guarantor of continuity in teaching, worship, sacraments, and prayer. (188)
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